As part of its focus on deep learning Google is expanding its academic at MILA, renewing Yoshua Bengio’s Focused Research Award and offering Focused Research Awards to MILA faculty at University of Montreal and McGill University: Pascal Vincent, Aaron Courville, Christopher Pal, Doina Precup, Joelle Pineau, Simon Lacoste-Julien, and Laurent Charlin.

“The award covering three years will fund seven faculty across a number of Montreal institutions and will help tackle some of the biggest challenges in machine learning and AI, including applications in the realm of systems that can understand and generate natural language,” wrote Shibl Mourad, Head of Engineering, Google Montreal in a blogpost.

In addition, Google is also creating a deep learning and AI research group in Montreal, linked to the Google Brain team in Mountain View, California. The lab will be led by Hugo Larochelle, who was earlier with Twitter’s central AI team.

“This kind of corporate investment paired with a burgeoning AI start-up community and substantial government funding to the IVADO hub for data science, deep learning and operations research has turned Montreal into a global machine intelligence powerhouse,” Mourad further wrote on this blogpost.

University of Montreal and McGill together now count more than 150 researchers (including students) in deep learning, the greatest academic concentration in the world. In collaboration with academic partners such as Google, incubators and start-ups, MILA and IVADO are making Montreal a hub for AI and technological innovation.

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